“Chiefly the mold of a man's fortune is in his own hands.”

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book I, Ch. 4.

"On Getting on in the World".
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

I.i.2
Epistulae ad Caesarem senem

Sallust, Epistulae ad Caesarem senem, I.1.2

“Old Hundredth” p. 162 (originally published in New Worlds Science Fiction #100, November 1960)
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)
Context: When the first flint, the first shell, was shaped into a weapon, that action shaped man. As he molded and complicated his tools, so they molded and complicated him. He became the first scientific animal. And at last, via information theory and great computers, he gained knowledge of all his parts. He formed the Laws of Integration, which reveal all beings as part of a pattern and show them their part in the pattern. There is only the pattern; the pattern is all the universe, creator and created.

The Iron Hand of Mars
Context: Stick with it, Xanthus. There are fortunes to be made out of bristle for a man with deft hands.

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
Context: We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. Again, comrades over there, take the lesson from your own experience. Not only did you not grudge, but you gloried in the promotion of the great generals who gained their promotion by leading their army to victory. So it is with us. We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.

Maxim 283
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

Source: Stray Birds